Bücher von Pippa Goldschmidt

In Night Vision Pippa Goldschmidt writes about outer space and explores its multiple meanings as a place of awe and wonder to a more materialistic site in which scientific ideas are formulated and tested. This book explores space as a location of potential capital where commerce is being developed, leading to a new threatened 'enclosure of the commons'. Goldschmidt posits that outer space is not just a backdrop to our human lives, it connects us to each other through space-time, its ability to generate myths and stories, and our reliance on it to transmit information.How we view and use space is narrated through the lens of Pippa Goldschmidt's own interactions with it: a child reading a guide to the night sky, an astrophysicist doing research on the most distant objects known in the Universe, a regulator of outer space using international and British legislation, and finally a writer. Night Vision argues that we need to understand the importance of outer space in all its various manifestations so that we can protect it, and ourselves, from exploitation. Just as we have destroyed natural habitats on our own planet, we are now at risk of doing the same to other planets.

The lives of people (mostly women) who help to produce science or who are affected by it.The stories in Schrödinger's Wife (and Other Possibilities) travel through laboratories, observatories, rockets, hotel rooms, hospitals, out to the Antarctic and into outer space, following the trails of women scientists, technicians, patients, doctors, and spouses in their encounters with some of the most extraordinary aspects of modern science.In these science-inspired tales the nuclear physicist Lise Meitner discovers the secrets of nuclear fission while fleeing from the Nazis. An employee in the underground laboratory CERN refuses to have her own photo taken. The biologist Margaret Bastock must figure our the impact of genes on behavior while coping with post-war expectations of women’s own behavior. Scientists from East and West Germany stationed at opposite sides of Antarctica experience their own fall of the Berlin Wall. The elusive physicist Bruno Pontecorvo theorizes about an equally elusive particle. Schrödinger’s wife Anny uses his theory to get her revenge on her philandering husband. A scientific theory worries about being discovered by a woman, and a resident in a special institution extrapolates the history of the universe from a piece of toast. In this, her second collection of short stories, Pippa Goldschmidt explores the lives of real and imaginary scientists, focusing on the human emotions and social connections behind the discoveries.